The Circuit board has arrived for the Weird Sound Generator.  Looking forward to getting this thing underway.  It looks like there could be a lot of potential for some interesting experimenting beyond what is documented.  Notice the “Experiment Kludge Area” on the board…. a very conciderate touch.  I ordered parts from several electronics stores in a mission to see how much cheaper I could build it compared to the $90 price of the full component kit.  It’s around $50 cheaper at this point, without the case.

This thing arrived yesterday and it looks promising.  It’s from a series of toys called Beat Blenders.  They each have a different theme (this one is Hot Hits) and there are 3 different parts that you can combine and sequence into a jam.  There’s Drums, Rhythm and Melody trachs and around 5 different parts for each.  Moving the slider at the bottom moves the “playhead” of the sequence forward or back.  There’s already a few obvious enhancments that can be made.  Tempo/pitch can be expanded, volume knob and instead of the slider i’d like to have direct access buttons to the different parts of the sequence.  There may also be a way to randomly jump to different parts of the track…. if so this thing will ROCK.  Stay tuned.

Here’s a quick video of the completed Photo Trans-Actovator.  As you can see this thing is highly sensitive to light.  In the demo I’m using my hands to shadow the photo sensors and also turning on and off ambient light will have a drastic effect.  enjoy.

Added a switch the will mute the main sax voice and also added the pitch bends.  Nothing special here, but I love the low pitch growl this thing produces.  Nice texture.